My company owns a license for version 10.5 of InstallShield. I have a cursory familiarity with the tool's capabilities, but have never used it myself. Now, we are looking to build an installer for a WPF based application, reliant on the 3.5 framework. Do I really need to upgrade to the latest and greatest or will the 4 year old version I have available suffice for this purpose?
My company owns a license for version 10.5 of InstallShield. I have a cursory familiarity with the tool's capabilities, but have never used it myself. Now, we are looking to build an installer for a WPF based application, reliant on the 3.5 framework. Do I really need to upgrade to the latest and greatest or will the 4 year old version I have available suffice for this purpose?
Thanks in advance for your help.
You could probably make the 10.5 version work, but you'd have to work much harder at it. For example, newer versions of InstallShield support newer versions of the .NET Framework, and can help you build that into your Setup.exe, etc., automatically.
Since you're targeting a version of the .NET Framework that didn't exist when 10.5 was released, you may have to roll a lot of your own functionality, instead of being able to rely on affordances built into the InstallShield editor. If it were me doing it, I'd much rather upgrade to the latest version than fight a lot of needless battles, especially if I had only cursory experience with the product.
10.5 have setup prerequisites but I don't remember what bugs have been fixed since then.
If you want setup.exe and redist the framework, you can check it out and see if it'll work. If you want to do basic MSI and only gate the installer with a LaunchCondition, you'll be more likely to be fine.
Also if you need to do any XML manipulation, it was pretty buggy back then. Either that or I just didn't understand XPath enough back then! ( Or both )
Oh, and don't even consider using any InstallScript. Versions prior to 12 had serious issues.
